In December 1832 and January 1833 the British reoccupied the Falkland Islands or the Malvinas. This reassertion of British sovereignty began an uninterrupted period of control that lasted until 2 April 1982, when armed forces of the Republic of Argentina forced the surrender of the British governor and garrison at Stanley, the capital of what the British had come to call “The Falkland Islands Dependency.” The Argentine occupation ended with a surrender to British arms on 14 June 1982. These celebrated events of recent times brought forth a fundamental question, here addressed: Why did the British possess the islands in the first place? The British government's motivation for reoccupying the Falklands in 1832–33 is insufficiently explained in existing historical literature, though the legal intricacies are known. Julius Goebel the Younger, a student of international law, termed the contest for sovereignty of the islands a “struggle.” However, his work, a study in international legal history, was not based on strategic, maritime, and economic considerations and, moreover, did not probe the question of British motivation in reoccupation. V. F. Boyson's history of the islands is a valuable survey but it inadequately investigates the same theme and the precise period under consideration. Other histories of the Falklands written in English do not examine the matter of motivation in depth. Argentine sources are extensive and see the British reoccupation as illegal. They tend at the same time to recite the arguments for sovereignty over the Malvinas; and one Argentine historian has called the reoccupation “the third English invasion,” in reference to two previous occupations by the British in 1765 and 1771. The following inquiry seeks to rectify these matters and is based on British documents, particularly in-letters of Commanders-in-Chief on the South American station. These reports to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty reveal two concerns: firstly, the infringement by Argentine and American traders and marine exploiters in territory and territorial waters traditionally claimed but not effectively occupied by the United Kingdom and, secondly, the importance of the Falklands as a base from which to safeguard the sea routes of the southern oceans.

Stephen J. Greenberg's recent article in these pages, “Dating Civil War Pamphlets, 1641–1644,” commendably calls attention to the two nearly identical manuscript catalogues that George Thomason had drawn up to catalogue his collection. Quite properly, Greenberg emphasizes the manuscript catalogues' difference from (and for some purposes, superiority to) the printed catalogue of the collection edited by G. K. Fortescue. A generation ago Lois Spencer did the same thing in two important articles on Thomason and his collection, but for lack of a follow-up, her insights have been largely ignored. Greenberg also attempted some statistical comparisons of dates of Fortescue's catalogue, Thomason's catalogue, and the Stationers' Registers.

Greenberg's study of the Thomason collection grew out of his project of discovering the time lag between the occurrence of an event and its publication in the press. While Greenberg's interest in the collection is welcome, his efforts are misleading, and in some respects, seriously flawed. My purpose here is to clarify the nature of the Thomason collection, which is still surprisingly misunderstood, and to assist other researchers in its most profitable use.

I read with great interest Michael Mendle's critique of my work in dating pamphlets from the English Civil War. Obviously, this is an area where honest men may disagree, particularly since so many of our conclusions rest upon different interpretations of an ambiguous manuscript. Nevertheless, I find that I must begin by saying that Professor Mendle has entirely missed the main purpose of my research, and has therefore misconstrued my methodology.

As I wrote in my original article, my chief concern was availability:

The demands of these questions imposed their own limitations, and pointed to their own solutions. Only two day-by-day lists of publications exist: the Thomason manuscript and the registers of the Stationers' Company. The latter is clearly insufficiently complete for the task at hand. Moreover, it is well-known that entry in the Stationers' Registers is not a guarantee of actual publication. We are left with the Thomason manuscript as a difficult but unique source for the answers that I sought.

Exactly when the two existing manuscripts were compiled is an unanswerable question. They may have been compiled, as Professor Mendle suggests, when the collection was nearly complete. They may represent a fair copy of notes that Thomason had been keeping all along. It is inescapable, however, that the manuscripts preserve the order in which Thomason obtained the tracts, and do so with far greater accuracy than either the printed British Museum catalogue or the present bound volumes.